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* This is the "dirty Dravidianism" (thiruttu dravidam) imported by European padres 200 years ago into India. This is an eternal "unending poison" (theera vidam - pun on dravidam) for the unity of India. (E R Sakthivel)

* These people don't even know what city is where. In their idiocy, poor Kochi got moved downwards. (Mylai Ramesh) - (Yes, Kochi seems to be below Thiruvananthapuram in that map).

Long way to go to the truth... My claim still stands solidly at 12209 BCE! (This might explain the un-answered question by Valmiki Ramayana....namely.. how did Ravana and his army traveled and crossed Sri Lanka, when not using boats or Pushpak).

Another data point towards testing of my theory for 3 plausible behaviors of landmass between India and SriLanka.

NEW YORK (AP) — Just a week after scientists reported evidence that our species left Africa earlier than we thought, another discovery is suggesting the date might be pushed back further.Homo sapiens arose in Africa at least 300,000 years ago and left to colonize the globe. Scientists think there were several dispersals from Africa, not all equally successful. Last week’s report of a human jaw showed some members of our species had reached Israel by 177,000 to 194,000 years ago.Now comes a discovery in India of stone tools, showing a style that has been associated elsewhere with our species. They were fashioned from 385,000 years ago to 172,000 years ago, showing evidence of continuity and development over that time. That starting point is a lot earlier than scientists generally think Homo sapiens left Africa.This tool style has also been attributed to Neanderthals and possibly other species. So it’s impossible to say whether the tools were made by Homo sapiens or some evolutionary cousin, say researchers who reported the finding Wednesday in the journal Nature .“We are very cautious on this point” because no human fossils were found with the tools, several authors added in a statement.It’s not clear how much the tool development reflects arrival of populations or ideas from outside India, versus being more of a local development, said one author, Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education in Chennai, India.The tool-making style was a change from older stone tools found at the site, featuring a shift to smaller flakes, for example.

Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist who specializes in human evolution in Asia but didn’t participate in the work, said he did not think the tools show that our species had left Africa so long ago.“I simply don’t buy it,” said Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.Instead, he said,[b] he believes one of our evolutionary cousins in India developed the tool style independently of outside influence. The tools at the site northwest of Chennai in southeastern India are closely related to the older tool-making style there and seem to represent a transition, he said.[/b]The idea that they reflect knowledge brought in from elsewhere would be tough to prove in India, he said. The country has few well-studied archaeological sites and only one fossil find from this period, from a forerunner of Homo sapiens that was associated with the earlier style of tool-making, Petraglia said.

Archaeologists have discovered sophisticated stone tools in India dating back some 385,000 years. That’s all sorts of incredible, because Homo sapiens like you and me didn’t leave Africa until about 175,000 years ago. The discovery is resetting what we know about so-called “archaic” humans and the dramatic extent to which they spread out from Africa so very long ago.New research published in Nature suggests a Middle Paleolithic culture existed in India around 385,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought. Also known as the Middle Stone Age, this stage of hominid development is characterized by the emergence of sophisticated stone tools, including fancy new blades, distinctive flaking and pointing methods, and a preference for smaller tools. Prior evidence had suggested the emergence of Middle Paleolithic culture in India to between 140,000 to 46,000 years ago, so the new discovery is causing a big rethink of conventional “Out of Africa” dispersion models and the kinds of cultures that existed in South Asia at this early stage in human history.When the first hominids left Africa some 1.7 million years ago, they were armed with a killer app known to archaeologists as the Acheulian hand axe, and it’s by this tool that the Acheulian culture is known. But like any technology, it eventually became obsolete as new, better tools become popular. The resulting shift from Lower Paleolithic Acheulian culture to the Middle Paleolithic, which happened between 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, signified a monumental transition for the human species, marked by the adoption of more sophisticated tools and manufacturing techniques.In all, some 7,261 stone artifacts were pulled from the site, which is situated on the banks of a tributary stream of the Kortallaiyar River. The people who once called this place home used locally available quartzite to manufacture their tools. Using a technique called luminescence dating, Akhilesh and Pappu were able to document the trend away from Acheulian technology as it was gradually replaced by Middle Paleolithic tech. Luminescence dating measures the amount of light emitted from the energy stored in certain rocks and soils. It’s good for when radiocarbon dating is not possible (e.g. samples are too old), and it allows for the dating of artifacts rather than the organic material in which the items are found.By studying the tools, the researchers documented a gradual shift away from the use of bifaces and other Acheulian large-flake technologies, and a shift towards smaller tools, and the use of distinctive and diverse Levallois flake and point strategies.The presence of Levallois tools is particularly interesting because their construction requires considerable foresight and planning. Acheulian hand axes were manufactured by hammering a piece of flint into a specific shape, but Lavallois tools required two stages of construction: knapping, or hand carving, a flint core into a specific shape, and then detaching the core with a single decisive strike. The builder has to imagine the tool’s final shape and size within the flint core before the shaping can begin. That requires some brains, so the discovery of Levallois tools shows how smart these “archaic” humans really were.

If those stone tools in India are accurately dated and **IF** they are from our species then the dates deduced from genetics have a problem. In general this would tend to move all dates deduced from genetics back in time. So **IF** these stone tools are from our species, then it would tend to push back the dates of last migration etc, further back in time, and kills AIT even more stone-cold dead.

Neanderthals went extinct of the order of 40K years ago; Denisovians roughly the same time. You think some close-to-modern-human species survived to within the last 10K years or so?

(Probably best to call them sub-species, because our line of descent includes interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovians. Some say Neanderthals didn't go extinct as such, they got absorbed into the human line.

They were homo-sapiens. There is no evidence to suggest they were an earlier species. It discredits Indian civilization by suggesting as much. Human fossils are rare in India as the practice of burial is rare.

Mort Walker wrote:They were homo-sapiens. There is no evidence to suggest they were an earlier species. It discredits Indian civilization by suggesting as much. Human fossils are rare in India as the practice of burial is rare.

There are some problems with such an assertion

1. That only Homo sapiens made tools2. I doubt if there was cremation 250,000 years ago. But in a hot, moist climate bones don't survive3. The anxiety about discrediting civilization can be set aside for the purpose of hypotheses that deal with dates earlier than what is considered "human civilization".

A_Gupta wrote:Neanderthals went extinct of the order of 40K years ago; Denisovians roughly the same time. You think some close-to-modern-human species survived to within the last 10K years or so?

(Probably best to call them sub-species, because our line of descent includes interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovians. Some say Neanderthals didn't go extinct as such, they got absorbed into the human line.

I am not trying to say this as a critique of western scientific methods - but just as an observation. "Evidence" is needed to prove something. The existence of Neanderthals and Denisovians has been proven by genetics and bones. Just a few years ago Denisovians did not exist and a few decades ago Neanderthals were hypothesized to be ancestors of humans. Then the story became "Neanderthals and Humans: Two separate species, but humans were more intelligent". And now the story is they were two related species that interbred but one died out leaving evidence in human genes.

There may have been a sentient species 250000 years ago. They may (or may not) be direct ancestors of humans. If 2-3 "intelligent" species coexisted - technology (toolmaking/fishing/sailing/fire) could spread from one to the other. Humans at least have frequently consciously copied animal methods. I can't say if non human species have "copied" human methods - though apes have been trained. But they "have adapted"

Mort Walker wrote:They were homo-sapiens. There is no evidence to suggest they were an earlier species. It discredits Indian civilization by suggesting as much. Human fossils are rare in India as the practice of burial is rare.

There are some problems with such an assertion

1. That only Homo sapiens made tools2. I doubt if there was cremation 250,000 years ago. But in a hot, moist climate bones don't survive3. The anxiety about discrediting civilization can be set aside for the purpose of hypotheses that deal with dates earlier than what is considered "human civilization".

Primates have been known to improvise tools, but what makes this find from 172,000 to 385,000 years ago different is that these stone tools are more refined making them more the works of homo-sapian rather than an ancient hominid. What is puzzling is that there are no bones or fossilized remains to find with these tools like in other places. There are no signs of any ritualized burial either.

I don't know if you've ever visited the Bhimbetka caves in MP south of Bhopal, but the ASI did find some ritualized skeletal burials over 30,000 years old. Some of humans that were over 7' tall. That place has been inhabited for nearly 100,000 years and some of the frescos shows men on horses hunting. It too is a hot and humid climate.

Well, if one takes the dates arrived at by (current) genetics that date the divergence of modern non-African and African humans to around 100K years ago as totally proven, then the humans that built those stone tools found in India belong to an older out-of-Africa that seems to have left little trace behind in the modern genome -- but maybe people weren't looking for such, and now they will (just like Neanderthal was found as part of the non-African-human genome). (Or else the calibration of the genetic clock is wrong - I'd put this as less probable).

Evidence presented in July 2017 suggests that early Homo sapiens, or "another species in Africa closely related to us," might have first migrated out of Africa still earlier, around 270,000 year ago.[32]

The above is genetic evidence at 270K years or earlier a branch of humanity came out of Africa, interbred with Neanderthals, making later Neanderthals more closely related to modern humans than Denisovians are, even though Neanderthals and Denisovians arose from a common ancestor.

Luminescence dating at the stratified prehistoric site of Attirampakkam, India, has shown that processes signifying the end of the Acheulian culture and the emergence of a Middle Palaeolithic culture occurred at 385 ± 64 thousand years ago (ka), much earlier than conventionally presumed for South Asia1. The Middle Palaeolithic continued at Attirampakkam until 172 ± 41 ka. Chronologies of Middle Palaeolithic technologies in regions distant from Africa and Europe are crucial for testing theories about the origins and early evolution of these cultures, and for understanding their association with modern humans or archaic hominins, their links with preceding Acheulian cultures and the spread of Levallois lithic technologies2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20. The geographic location of India and its rich Middle Palaeolithic record are ideally suited to addressing these issues, but progress has been limited by the paucity of excavated sites and hominin fossils as well as by geochronological constraints1,8. At Attirampakkam, the gradual disuse of bifaces, the predominance of small tools, the appearance of distinctive and diverse Levallois flake and point strategies, and the blade component all highlight a notable shift away from the preceding Acheulian large-flake technologies9. These findings document a process of substantial behavioural change that occurred in India at 385 ± 64 ka and establish its contemporaneity with similar processes recorded in Africa and Europe2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,11,12,13. This suggests complex interactions between local developments and ongoing global transformations. Together, these observations call for a re-evaluation of models that restrict the origins of Indian Middle Palaeolithic culture to the incidence of modern human dispersals after approximately 125 ka19,21.

Mort Walker wrote:Primates have been known to improvise tools, but what makes this find from 172,000 to 385,000 years ago different is that these stone tools are more refined making them more the works of homo-sapian rather than an ancient hominid.

That is an assumption. We don't know if there was an intelligent non human species (not Homo sapiens) that made "better" tools. It cannot be assumed that ONLY Homo sapiens ever had the ability to produce such tools.

Mort Walker wrote:Primates have been known to improvise tools, but what makes this find from 172,000 to 385,000 years ago different is that these stone tools are more refined making them more the works of homo-sapian rather than an ancient hominid.

That is an assumption. We don't know if there was an intelligent non human species (not Homo sapiens) that made "better" tools. It cannot be assumed that ONLY Homo sapiens ever had the ability to produce such tools.

shiv wrote: ...2. I doubt if there was cremation 250,000 years ago. But in a hot, moist climate bones don't survive

Fire was discovered lot earlier than 250kybp. The time period is between 1.7 to 0.2 mybp but 600 mybp is the consensus time frame. Is there a reason to reject cremation out of hand? Homo erectus might have had ax reason to cremate as an alternative to the remains of their dead kith and kin become fodder to scavenging animals and birds.

shiv wrote: ...2. I doubt if there was cremation 250,000 years ago. But in a hot, moist climate bones don't survive

Fire was discovered lot earlier than 250kybp. The time period is between 1.7 to 0.2 mybp but 600 mybp is the consensus time frame. Is there a reason to reject cremation out of hand? Homo erectus might have had ax reason to cremate as an alternative to the remains of their dead kith and kin become fodder to scavenging animals and birds.

Fair point. Energy requirement is a weak excuse I can offer. I also offer a shift of goalpost by saying, forget human bones, we have not yet found animal bones of that antiquity though the tools themselves wsre probably used on animals.

I wonder if scanning electron micrography may detect possible organic remains on the tools the way silk threads were found in Harappa beads.

Here is a nation cooking up "extra ancient" pedigree for himself and contrast this with another nation, India, that is reluctant to even consider herself ancient Worse has her history written by racist Aryans so called Invaders!

"Tracing back 5,300 years, a nation was established by a group of people living near the ancient city of Liangzhu. With abundant sources of food, their kingdom covered 36,000 square kilometers along Lake Taihu.

Notice how hyperbole is ok when it comes to China, but skepticism, underplay and humility is required when it comes to India:

The city's advanced irrigation stunned the world.

"From 2009 to 2015, new techniques were applied to our research. Through RS (remote sensing) and GIS, also through knowledge of hydraulic engineering, archeologists discovered a hydrological system outside the city that controlled up to 100 square kilometers for more than 5,000 years.

It was the world's earliest hydrological system, designed to protect the city from floods, Liu said.

"From 2008 to 2017 we had a new breakthrough in the inner part of the city, including its river network, palace zone, the emperor's tomb, granary and workshop," Liu said. "Surprisingly the city boasts urban planning with different zones performing different functions well. Urban residents mainly worked on producing jade ware, stone ware and other vessels, while rural people did something totally different."

From this archeologists could deduce social strata, Liu said.

More than 160 sites were discovered in the suburbs of the ancient city in the last nine years, doubling the total historical sites.

Through Carbon-14 testing, archeologists could date the hydrological system and tombs as between 5,300 and 4,200 years old.

World significance

Liangzhu has attracted attention outside China. British archeologist Colin Renfrew visited Liangzhu on March 21 last year and said Liangzhu culture was unique and complex, providing a new opportunity for archeologists to consider ancient civilizations.

The development of water transportation in the ancient city was rarely seen in Mesopotamia, a fact that may inspire researchers to look at Chinese and global cultures in a totally new way, he said.

Some 23 experts from all over the world participated in archeological work at Liangzhu. All were amazed. English art historian Jessica Rawson said the site was of great importance to world heritage.

Liangzhu would make contribute three key contributions to world heritage, Chen said.

"Firstly, it provide evidence of history," he said. "Secondly, it is an authentic historical site based on the archeological excavations, which reveals the real city dates back to 5,000 years ago.

"Last but not least, it is well preserved and can set an example for Chinese historical sites."

Of course it can set an example for other Chinese historical sites to become "extra ancient" - game on!

a team led by archaeologist Shanti Pappu determined that most of the tools are between 385,000 and 172,000 years old. What makes these dates noteworthy is that they upend the idea that tool-making was transformed in India after an influx of modern Homo sapiens came from Africa starting about 130,000 years ago.

According to these findings, hominins in India were making tools that looked an awful lot like what people were making in Africa almost 250,000 years before they encountered modern humans.

Dipanker wrote:My assumption is wrong or not can be proved/disproved once I have the the equations to compute the RA's and DEC w.r.t time and then I can run a simulation for a period of 26,000 years. I did think about the boundary conditions in the change of direction of rotational axis in my assumption/hypothesis.

Anyway as soon as I get hold of the equations, I will have the answer and I will post the results here! So far I am leaning towards my hypothesis being right.

It's commendable that you want to check this yourself (and I'm not being sarcastic here). But just to make you aware - all of us who went through this verification (myself included - you might not see my solution in the math dhaga, but Amber G posted the problem in multiple threads, and I posted my solution in one of them - I don't remember which thread that was) - well, we're all reinventing the wheel. The Voyager software that Nilesh used for his work clearly showed the phenomenon of A "walking ahead" of V for the above time period, and this accounts for the proper motion part of the problem as well. That the software shows the phenomenon, is also a point of validation. This is not to say that you shouldn't check it out yourself, but if you see something different from what the software shows, and from what so many of us on BRF showed about two or three years ago, then it could also be in your math. So if you see something different, please post your math here, and we'll work to figure out the source of the difference.

Since I was skeptical about the accuracy of the Voyager software, back in December I wrote to the developers , Carina Software, inquiring about the accuracy of the software, I am posting the answer I got from them (with my email address changed). The answer I got is that it is not 100% accurate for that far back. My question is at the bottom.

Fw: Fwd: Re: Question related to Voyager 4.5 softwarePeopleyyyyyyy <yyyyyyy@earthlink.net> Jan 3 at 7:12 PMTo XXXXXXX@xyz.netMessage bodyI am forwarding this from a personal account as for some reason it was kicked back as

BTW since you have carefully masked out your own email address, at least have the basic decency to edit your post and remove this Marilyn's email address as well. I am sure the poor lady would not appreciate having her private info plastered by you on a publicly viewable internet forum. Especially after she (ill-advisedly) trusted you enough to forward you her company's response from her personal email account.

^Oops, Thanks for pointing that, just edited her email out. Hopefully not too late. That was an absent minded omission. Also missed the NOT in front of accurate, so may be you want to change your ooh no, ooh ahh now!

There is no measurement that is not limited in precision.The question is what precision do you need for your application?

The unaided human eye can resolve about 1 arc minute. The best earth-bound optical telescopes do about a hundred times better.

The positions of stars relative to each other is known with sufficient accuracy many millenia back for any practical purpose (telescopic or unaided human eyes). The uncertainties come from the position of the earth relative the stars. Again, the relevance is relative to your application.

sudarshan wrote:It's commendable that you want to check this yourself (and I'm not being sarcastic here). But just to make you aware - all of us who went through this verification (myself included - you might not see my solution in the math dhaga, but Amber G posted the problem in multiple threads, and I posted my solution in one of them - I don't remember which thread that was) - well, we're all reinventing the wheel. The Voyager software that Nilesh used for his work clearly showed the phenomenon of A "walking ahead" of V for the above time period, and this accounts for the proper motion part of the problem as well. That the software shows the phenomenon, is also a point of validation. This is not to say that you shouldn't check it out yourself, but if you see something different from what the software shows, and from what so many of us on BRF showed about two or three years ago, then it could also be in your math. So if you see something different, please post your math here, and we'll work to figure out the source of the difference.

Since I was skeptical about the accuracy of the Voyager software, back in December I wrote to the developers , Carina Software, inquiring about the accuracy of the software, I am posting the answer I got from them (with my email address changed). The answer I got is that it is not 100% accurate for that far back. My question is at the bottom.

Fw: Fwd: Re: Question related to Voyager 4.5 softwarePeople

I thought the point of the above was for you to do your own math to verify (or not) the AV observation? Did you not do the math at all, or did you do it and come up with inconvenient results (i.e., did the math show something you didn't want to post here)?

Instead of addressing your own point about "it should be pretty easy to do the math on the AV observation, I'll do it and post results here," you are reduced to quibbling about the accuracy of the software and star positions? Yes, the astronomical observations that far back definitely come with precision issues. Everybody in the field knows this. Did you do any analysis of whether the tolerance on the AV observation back in ~5000 BC is within precision limits, or well outside?

And how did you come up with this particular date of Jan 1, 4713 BC? Just curious.

The proper motions of stars are only known at best, at 3 digits of

accuracy. Therefore, calculations of star positions thousands of years ago are

limited in precision.

This is the important point, isn't it? Quantifying the precision, and seeing whether it washes out the observed shift in AV positions, or whether the shift is big enough that the imprecision doesn't matter?

For that matter, all scientific research is precision limited, including genetics, especially when extrapolating that far back (but technically, science is imprecise even when extrapolating to yesterday - so even extrapolating to yesterday is not "100% accurate"). And I don't even want to start commenting on all the "minor precision issues" in the "linguistics-based Aryan/Dravidian nonsense." So, instead of "writing to the software maker" to "verify the obvious," why don't you "tell me something I don't already know?"

The answer I got is that it is not 100% accurate for that far back.

If this is the entire point of your post, you might as well start making more enlightening posts about "the sun rises in the east, but this is not 100% accurate east, so we should stop saying the sun rises in the east" or "the surface temperature of the sun is 6000 K, but this is not a 100% accurate number, so we shouldn't do any calculations of heat flux from the sun - because, you see, they will not be 100% accurate."